Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories

Death in Midsummer, and Other Stories

Mishima's own selection of his best and most essential stories. Nine of Yukio Mishima's finest stories were personally selected by te Japanese writer himself; they represent his extraordinary ability to depict, with deftness and penetration, a wide variety of human beings during significant moments. His characters are geisha who request wishes from the moon, sophisticates who scorn yet follow tradition, and seppuku-committing soldiers and their loyal wives who follow them in death. This edition includes one of Mishima's "modern Noh plays," remarkable for its uncanny intensity.

Author description

Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) was many people. The best known in Japan of the writers to emerge there after World War II, he was by far the most published abroad. Mishima completed his first novel the year he entered the University of Tokyo. More followed (some twenty-three, the last completed the day of his death in November, 1970), along with more than forty play, over ninety short stories, several poetry and travel volumes and hundreds of essays. Influenced by European literature, in which he was exceptionally well read, he was an interpreter to his own people of Japan's ancient virtues, to which he urged a return. He had sung on the stage, starred in and directed movies and was a noted practitioner of Japan's traditional martial arts. He seemed at the height of his career and vitality at the age of forty-five, when after a demonstration in the public interest he committed suicide by ceremonial seppuku.